Rock Solid

“Anvil! The Story of Anvil.”

The most stirring release of the year thus far is a documentary. No surprise in that, given the current state of feature films, or in the fact that “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” is a documentary about a heavy-metal band. But this film is about a failed heavy-metal band, which sounds about as purposeful as a vegan shark. Back in the nineteen-eighties, Anvil was, if not huge, on the verge of hugeness. It was never, according to the movie, one of the Big Four—a term that I always associated with the Paris peace conference of 1919, but which, on further inspection, turns out to refer to Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer. (Specialists might prefer to file them under thrash metal, that delicate subset of the genre, but “Anvil!” is wise enough to steer clear of such hairsplitting, not least because, in a world where most of the guitarists look like exploded spaniels, there is an awful lot of hair to split.) Still, Anvil had its adherents, and we find a swarm of them in a clip of the Super Rock Festival of 1984, in Japan, where the band’s lead singer, Steve Kudlow, can be seen onstage playing his guitar with a sex toy, thus raising the question of whether he takes his plectrum to bed.

Kudlow is seldom known as Steve. To his friends and admirers, for visible reasons, he is Lips. In 1973, in Toronto, he met a fellow-local named Robb Reiner, a drummer by vocation—and no relation to the Rob Reiner who directed “This Is Spinal Tap,” the great mock documentary about heavy metal, though both bands would relish the freak coincidence. The decision that Lips and Robb reached as teen-agers, to rock together, is one that they have stuck to for thirty-six years. That symbiosis has come to fuse the pair so unbreakably that, at some points in the documentary, you can scarcely tell them apart—never more so than when they bicker, which is half the time. “Why am I your fall guy, constantfuckingly?” a plaintive Reiner asks, amid the angry fallout of a recording session. “Because I love you,” Lips replies, quite without embarrassment or doubt. I have noticed something similar in the bond between Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt, of the British group Status Quo, and we should celebrate the way in which pairs of aging rockers tend to wind up like lovely, crumbling old married couples, with each one finishing the other’s sentences and pining when he has to go away.

“Anvil!” gets going in the present day, with the band half-forgotten, and Lips on the skids. We watch him delivering prepared meals to schools in Scarborough, Ontario, driving along snowy roads and musing on shepherd’s pie and meat loaf. At one point, he wears a food worker’s hairnet, thereby morphing into a dead ringer for Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler.” Reiner, meanwhile, has some sort of demolition job, which at least allows him to use a power drill—a short hop, surely, from the task of hammering out the beat in “Metal on Metal,” still the band’s signature song. Even here, though, the men’s ponderings have a sublime tone—a muted chord of resignation and expectancy that immediately puts you on their side. “After all’s said and done, I can say that all has been said and done,” Lips remarks, sounding like a bankrupt in Dickens or a derelict in Beckett. (The film’s director, Sacha Gervasi, went from being a roadie for Anvil, in the eighties—the musicians called him Teabag, because he’s English—to working on an archive of Samuel Beckett material, so this film may represent an unrepeatable chance to merge his interests.) Many such gems fall from the mouth of Lips; after everything on tour goes “drastically wrong,” he gently points out that “at least there was a tour for it to go wrong on.” How can you not love a man who thinks like that, dredging the television of consolation from the swimming pool of disaster?

In tune with this tiny hint of optimism, Gervasi uses his film to trace the recrudescence of Anvil. Progress is bumpy at best. Early on, we watch the band gather for Lips’s birthday, with the words “Happy Fucking 50” prettily inscribed in red icing on the cake, and a couple of long-term fans, Cut Loose and Mad Dog, all too welcome to join in. Out of nowhere, a European tour is arranged, and Anvil finds itself pounding away in a half-empty bar in Munich, with one loyal customer seated on an easy chair, headbanging all by himself. Nothing could be sadder than that, although Lips comes close when he exclaims, as the light fades at a Swedish outdoor festival, “Well, here we are backstage, trying to talk to Ted Nugent.” With all respect, that’s not the highest of human ambitions, is it? Spirits are raised by the sight of a Romanian venue with a capacity of ten thousand, and by rumors that “the mayor of Transylvania” himself may attend—a charming touch, in the gore-friendly world of thrash. In the event, the audience totals a hundred and seventy-four. The tour is organized, more or less, by a diehard Anvilista named Tiziana, who is incapable of booking train tickets, although her follow-up phone calls have the authentic tang of rock chick (“ ‘A’ like ‘ass,’ ‘S’ like ‘Sodom’ ”), and she, too, salvages something at the last minute by unexpectedly marrying the lead guitarist, Ivan Hurd.

Back comes Anvil, to the small comforts of home, and to a few more snippets of information, carefully staggered by Gervasi, about what that home consists of. I was unshaken by the news that Lips has a mother named Toby, and Robb has a sister named Droid, but the sequence in which Lips’s sister Rhonda lends him more than twelve thousand dollars to cut a new album (“He’s my dear brother and I’ve always loved him”) yields the shock that you get only from unvarnished goodness. We are shown a photograph of the infant Reiner with his father, a survivor of Auschwitz, and if, like me, you have been shamefully ignorant of Jewish Canadian heavy metal and its family background, here is your chance to atone. No wonder that Lips stumbles so badly when Cut Loose, the fan from the birthday bash, finds him a job in telephone sales. “I’ve been trained my whole life to be polite,” Lips says, and he duly fails to close a single deal. No wonder, too, that, as he mails off a tape of new songs to a former producer, solemnly licking the stamp, you fear the worst.

On the other hand, in the undying words of Lips, “It could never be worse than what it already is.” Maybe the worst is already over, and, if you’ve gone from performing in Japanese stadiums to playing badminton in the back yard, as Lips does, with a crowd consisting of one dog, so what? There are worse ways to live. Thus it is that, in the final leg of the film, Anvil, buoyed by a positive response to the Rhonda-sponsored album, heads back to Japan and to a hall that can hold twenty thousand souls. Is this the fillip in fortune of which the band has dreamed, or are we heading for another Transylvania? Will twenty thousand Japanese youngsters bother to have their eardrums pummelled at eleven-thirty-five in the morning—hardly the slot of a headline act—or will all but two dozen choose to stay in bed? I genuinely didn’t know the answer, and somehow it mattered very much; ninety minutes before, I had never heard of Anvil, yet now the question of the band’s fate held me in its grasp, and I could sense the people around me, likewise, holding their breath. If we were watching a Hollywood drama, of course, the hall would erupt; but this was a documentary, and anyone versed in “Hoop Dreams” knows that sometimes it is the regrettable duty of nonfiction to dash the kinds of sweet resolution in which Hollywood likes to traffic.

What actually happens I have no intention of revealing. Suffice it to say that the emotion that swept the cinema, at the climax, seemed unanimous, binding, and true: pretty much all that we ask of a movie, when you think about it. People who wait for the DVD, on the ground that this is a documentary about losers, made by a Brit, will miss out on that wonderful sense of conspiracy you get only in a cinema, with a bunch of complete strangers joined in a secret pact. Presumably, that is how Anvil aficionados feel, too, when they listen to songs like “March of the Crabs,” “Dr. Kevorkian,” and “Bushpig.” I had expected “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” to be no more than a real-life rehash of “This Is Spinal Tap,” and the very title of the new film has the same nudge of comic overkill that we treasure in the earlier one, whose famous scene of a guitar amp being turned up to eleven is echoed here. Some of Anvil’s lines could have been lifted straight from the mouths of Spinal Tap, and, as for the announcement, in the end credits, that the hapless Tiziana is “hoping to branch out into opera,” you couldn’t make it up. Yet, despite all that, Gervasi adds something that goes beyond Rob Reiner’s brief, and that no amount of mockery can tame. This film is not about rock music at all, still less about school lunches in Ontario, or unusual uses for vibrators; it is about time, and how it threatens to fade us out like a song on the radio, and why, risking ridicule, and leaning on love, we should crank up the volume and keep going. Whatever Lips maintains, not all has been said and done. ♦

Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”